CT Furniture, part of the Community Transport charity, supports local communities by selling donated high quality, second-hand furniture and electrical equipment at affordable prices, to individuals & families across the West Midlands and in the North East.

Since 2017, CT have been using Tengo Software’s specialist Charity Deliveries and Collections software to effortlessly manage the booking of deliveries of items purchased in store, along with the collection of items from donors for later sale in store, and Gift Aid claims.

A couple of months ago, GEMS Charity approached Tengo to not only design a new website for them, but to completely overhaul their brand and online presence. In double-quick time, Tengo re-branded, produced new logos for all on-line and print media, and produced a brand-new website, including content re-written by Tengo Consultancy.

HMRC’s stance on the end of year Gift Aid letter deadline in view of Covid-19 Coronavirus restrictions

Many of our clients have contacted us as they’re worried about meeting HMRC’s deadline for sending out annual Gift Aid letters, given the current situation regards the Covid-19 Coronavirus. As a result of the virus many Charities have the bulk of or all of their staff working from home, and many have also been furloughed until such time as charity retailers are allowed to begin trading again.

Until now there had been no confirmation from HMRC on whether the rules would be relaxed in light of the fact that it would be technically very difficult for charities to comply with the deadline. Tengo have spoken to the Retail Gift Aid and Digital Donations Lead at HMRC Charities, and have had it confirmed that it will be acceptable for charities to send out the letters ‘as soon as they possibly can’, and that in light of the current situation, the deadline is therefore flexible. Here’s the full official response that we have in writing from HMRC:

When you sell donated goods on behalf of people bringing them in to your Charity Shops, HMRC require you to contact anyone with end of year Gift Aid letters who has generated £20 or more’s worth of sales to let them know how much money has been raised. For those with less than £20 worth of sales, you need to contact them every 3 years.

Each tax year, this must be done by no later than the 31st of May. Full guidelines along with a template letter can be found on HMRC’s website here. The letters can be sent by email or by post.

It can be quite a task to aggregate all the data and complete the mailing of end of year Gift Aid letters – but Tengo Software’s Charity Shop Software makes the process as easy as it can be.

Many of our customers have contacted us with questions relating to the Coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak, so we are summarising our position here along with what we are offering to help our clients out during this concerning time.

Fortunately, the team at Tengo Software and our infrastructure is already designed in such a way that remote working is commonplace – as a precaution, all of our team are currently being instructed to work from home. All services are running as normal and will continue to do so even if the government impose further restrictions. Any on-site meetings scheduled in will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis, but installation, training, and any meetings can be effectively conducted remotely.

Do you love your local charity shop? Why not give them the gift of being able to claim, or claim more Gift Aid on donated goods. Tengo Software are offering a limited time offer of 3 months FREE use of our industry leading Charity Shop Software!

What benefit will this give to my favourite Charity Shop? Well, essentially it means they’ll make more money by doing exactly what they already do – selling on goods generously donated by members of the public. The Government gives charities an extra 25% on top of those sales proceeds under the Gift Aid scheme, but many Charity Shops are still not taking full advantage of this and some are not claiming this extra money at all – this is where Tengo Software can help!

If you’re new to the Charity Retail world, and you want to know how you claim gift aid in charity shops, here’s a short guide to the process of claiming Gift Aid on donated goods.

One key thing to note about claiming gift aid on donated goods, it’s the person who donates the goods to the charity against which a Gift Aid claim is made. To claim Gift Aid in charity shops on donated goods, you need to track each item that is donated with a unique reference, and record this when it’s sold – then collating the information in to a submission to HMRC to claim the Gift Aid revenue.

Age UK Lincoln & South Lincolnshire use Tengo Software’s charity shop EPoS and CRM systems, and found that their expertise were invaluable. The system is now helping the charity to raise invaluable funds which are being redirected back to the elderly in the communities they support.

Amanda Sowerby, Operations Director at Age UK Lincoln & South Lincolnshire, had the following to say about the software and their experiences with Tengo as a whole through the installation and training process, and ongoing support:

Tengo worked with FatFace to help them to venture in to charity retail for the very first time. Here’s what Will Crumbie, Finance Director of FatFace, had to say about how things are going:

“We opened our first FatFace foundation charity shop in Havant back in October 2018 and it took off much quicker and much better than we could have anticipated. The sales we made in our first week surpassed what we expected to take in our first year. The Tengo EPoS system certainly helped with this because it was so easy to use and enabled us to serve a large number of customers very quickly.

When the shop first opened, we had different staff from FatFace head office volunteering at the shop every day. Without such an easy to use system this would have been difficult to manage but everyone picked up the Tengo system with little or no training at all. We went on to raise over £250,000 in profit in our first year which will make a real difference to our partner charities.

The Tengo team were on hand to help us get everything set up and offer any advice we needed to get going and it has been great working with them.”

Berkeley Castle have been with Tengo Software since 2015, using their visitor attraction EPoS and on-line ticketting platform TripGiving.UK. They have boosted ticket sales by using the system to sell tickets to their amazing charitable visitor attraction both on-line and in person on-site, as well as handling donations.

Jackie Pennington, Operations Manager at Berkeley, had the following to say about the service:

“TripGiving has been a great addition to our website, the system works seamlessly with our tills and enables our visitors to purchase their admission tickets in advance of their visit. This benefits us in many ways; it speeds up the admission process, enables UK tax payers to gift aid their ticket whilst making their on-line purchase and also gives us an indication of anticipated visitor numbers for upcoming events. We also take our online donations through the system, as it is cheaper than other options. I would recommend this facility to other attractions!”

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